> many noble clerkes have endevoyred them to wryte and compyle many notable werkes and historyes to the ende that it myght come to the knowlege and under­stondyng of suche as ben ygnoraunt, of which the nombre is infenyte.

From The Game and Playe of the Chesse, which I misread as cheese and clicked on out of bafflement. It’s a book of moral lessons to be drawn from the chessmen.

I checked out the Alliterative Morte Arthure ( https://metseditions.org/read/KWj7bbRIl0RBUmG9uG60zTv8Wak97Z... ).

I'm charmed by the Middle English footnoting style of providing glosses for words that may trouble the modern-English-speaking reader without bothering to note which words those glosses are for.

However, this edition isn't typeset correctly, and the glosses are appearing attached to the wrong lines. (At least, I'm assuming that "great", glossing an empty line, is meant to gloss "grete" on the following line, and "shameful deeds", on the line "And the precious prayer / of his pris Moder" is actually meant to gloss the following line "Sheld us fro shamesdeede / and sinful workes".)†

This is a pretty serious problem.

More generally, these appear to be edited critical editions, and I wish academic texts would actually display the text of the work they represent. I don't mind displaying a standardized "editor's rendering", but show the actual text too. I want to know what the scribe wrote. This is an electronic reference. We can afford the space.

† Tangentially, it's also interesting that "sinful" counts as alliterating with "shield" and "shame".

METS was originally created as a wonky and complicated set of Drupal 7 pages with lots of bespoke hardcoded HTML, like what you are seeing, but along with working with Cast Iron Coding to migrate METS to a modern web application stack (https://castironcoding.com/article/mets-case-study) the team behind METS is also now working to transform all the fiddly HTML into much more feature-rich TEI-XML (https://tei-c.org/). You can already see the differences in features when filtering on the Editions page by the "TEI-XML" category, which is eventually how all the texts will look and operate (https://metseditions.org/editions?time_period=&category%5B%5...). A lot of that transformation can be automated luckily, but there are editors that are going to be doing the remaining work to get the transformation done.

Also, FWIW, the staff behind METS was funded by an NEH grant that was recently cancelled. The folks behind the publication series are now very much in fundraising mode to try and make up the extreme shortfall, so if anyone is interested in helping keeping this open and free resource online, donations very welcome!

https://metseditions.org/donate

One of the fascinating things about middle English for modern readers is that spelling was somewhat arbitrary. I suppose the literacy rate so low back then that the community of people blessed with the skill of reading and writing got to make up their own rules.

Books were expensive, because they were hand made. That’s probably the reason for low literacy.

When the printing press was invented, there arose a huge appetite for books of all kinds. People learned to read, because they could afford books now. With so many books in print, people could compare spellings of words, and this led to standardisation of spelling.

Spelling became uniform because of printing.

It'd be nice to have this translated to Modern English. To read side-by-side, at least. I'm interested in reading but it's quite a chore.

Google Translate get on to this please. kthnx.

Is it not already translated to modern English? The Alliterative Morte has line-by-line glosses and the Prose Merlin includes summaries in modern English and line-by-line glosses. Those are the texts that have been mentioned in the thread. What do you want?

I missed that, but tbh for me it's not enough. I'd like two columns side-by-side.

I still don't get it. Here's the opening of the "Vortiger's Tower" section of the Prose Merlin, chapter 2 according to the METS table of contents:

---

Thus they rode in one company, all four, till on a day that they passed through a field beside a town wherein were great plenty of children that therein were playing. And Merlin, that knew well that these four came to inquire after him, drew him toward one of the richest of the company, for that he knew him most cruel and hasty. He seized his staff and gave this child a great buffet. And anon, this other began to cry and weep and to mis-say ["revile"] Merlin, and reproved him with a loud voice, and called him misbegotten wretch and fatherless. When these messengers heard this, they came toward the child that was weeping and asked him which was he that had smitten him. And he them answered, "It is the son of a woman which never knew who him begat, no never man could tell of his father."

And when Merlin heard this, he came against ["towards"] them laughing and said "I am he that ye seek, and he that ye be sworn ye should slay, and bring my blood to King Vortiger." And [when] they heard him thus say, they were sore a-marveled and asked him, "Who hath told thee this?" Quoth he, "I knew it ere ye were sworn." Quoth they, "Then must thou come with us." "Nay," quoth he, "I doubt that ye will me slay."

---

I've made two types of changes here:

1. Words are given their modern spelling.

2. Words that are given glosses may be replaced ("wiste" -> "knew") or annotated ('against ["towards"]') with those glosses.

Doing a translation on top of that is pointless; this is already perfectly intelligible to a modern speaker. What would you gain by having a translation on the facing page?

Thanks. Do you have a link? I searched for Vortiger's Tower and just Vortiger and came up with nothing.

sent it through ministral (llm) running locally on my pc with a prompt to translate from old english to modern english and it seems to do a pretty good job at making it so. just a neat exercise

Literacy in England meant reading and writing in Latin and French.

this is still true for transliterated words and in my experience many people have a hard time accepting it, but if you borrow a word from outside your alphabet you may have many permissible spellings to achieve approximately the same pronunciation.

I received a METS edition of the Prose Merlin as a kid. Lots of fun reading that book. Indeed the arbitrary and self-inconsistent spelling was initially a turn off, but now I see it as more of a fuzzy orthography.

I like alternating between reading in a made up Middle English accent and reading as if it were modern English, which works because its prose not poetry where the rhyming and metre be all off.